We began the day with my cabin, Mango, making a delicious homemade breakfast for the rest of the group and the chaperones. After finishing, we headed to the boat to prepare for our experiment dives and once we got the scheduled site we came across too strong of a current and had to move to another site. We moved again due to another strong current in the area, but finally at a third site it was safe enough to dive. In the beginning of the dive it was difficult at first to create a perimeter with the measuring tape and the markers due to the uneven terrain of the coral, but we finally got everything to work and began our fish count. My job was to count the amount of blue tang (Dory) in an area that had some but not a lot of bleaching among stag horn coral. I counted five more or less blue tang with mostly adults swimming around and through the marked area. Right after the first dive ended we headed to the second dive sight to do a fish count in an area of very little bleaching among the stag horn coral where I actually found less blue tang in the area. I also got distracted for a little bit from a parrot fish nibbling on a piece of coral which is part of their diet. This dive was less difficult because we had experience from the first, but also more difficult because we didn’t untie the marker weights until we were under water. From these two dives we learned the hard way that we need to make sure have everything prepared before an experiment dive to make it as easy as possible to perform under the water. Later, we ate lunch on the boat next to the Sea Monkey boat and free swam in the water near the boat. After lunch we had a mangrove snorkel at a bay in northern Virgin Gorda. While this area was very shallow we saw many types of fish especially juveniles including barracudas and puffer fish. We ended the day early with time to work on our experiment presentation and with a great barbecue dinner made by Casey. Overall this was a very exhausting day and I’m glad we got extra time to get needed rest along with working on our projects.
